Outliers (8 page)

2.

Just after the First World War, Lewis Terman, a young professor of psychology at Stanford University, met a remarkable boy named Henry Cowell. Cowell had been raised in poverty and chaos. Because he did not get along with other children, he had been unschooled since the age of seven. He worked as a janitor at a one-room schoolhouse not far from the Stanford campus, and throughout the day, Cowell would sneak away from his job and play the school piano. And the music he made was beautiful.

Terman’s specialty was intelligence testing; the standard IQ test that millions of people around the world would take during the following fifty years, the Stanford-Binet, was his creation. So he decided to test Cowell’s IQ. The boy
must
be intelligent, he reasoned, and sure enough, he was. He had an IQ of above 140, which is near genius level. Terman was fascinated. How many other diamonds in the rough were there? he wondered.

He began to look for others. He found a girl who knew the alphabet at nineteen months, and another who was reading Dickens and Shakespeare by the time she was four. He found a young man who had been kicked out of law school because his professors did not believe that it was possible for a human being to precisely reproduce long passages of legal opinions from memory.

In 1921, Terman decided to make the study of the gifted his life work. Armed with a large grant from the Commonwealth Foundation, he put together a team of fieldworkers and sent them out into California’s elementary schools. Teachers were asked to nominate the brightest students in their classes. Those children were given an intelligence test. The students who scored in the top 10 percent were then given a second IQ test, and those who scored above 130 on that test were given a third IQ test, and from that set of results Terman selected the best and the brightest. By the time Terman was finished, he had sorted through the records of some 250,000 elementary and high school students, and identified 1,470 children whose IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. That group of young geniuses came to be known as the “Termites,” and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history.

For the rest of his life, Terman watched over his charges like a mother hen. They were tracked and tested, measured and analyzed. Their educational attainments were noted, marriages followed, illnesses tabulated, psychological health charted, and every promotion and job change dutifully recorded. Terman wrote his recruits letters of recommendation for jobs and graduate school applications. He doled out a constant stream of advice and counsel, all the time recording his findings in thick red volumes entitled
Genetic Studies of Genius
.

“There is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals,” Terman once said. And it was to those with a very high IQ, he believed, that “we must look for production of leaders who advance science, art, government, education and social welfare generally.” As his subjects grew older, Terman issued updates on their progress, chronicling their extraordinary achievements. “It is almost impossible,” Terman wrote giddily, when his charges were in high school, “to read a newspaper account of any sort of competition or activity in which California boys and girls participate without finding among the winners the names of one or more...members of our gifted group.” He took writing samples from some of his most artistically minded subjects and had literary critics compare them to the early writings of famous authors. They could find no difference. All the signs pointed, he said, to a group with the potential for “heroic stature.” Terman believed that his Termites were destined to be the future elite of the United States.

Today, many of Terman’s ideas remain central to the way we think about success. Schools have programs for the “gifted.” Elite universities often require that students take an intelligence test (such as the American Scholastic Aptitude Test) for admission. High-tech companies like Google or Microsoft carefully measure the cognitive abilities of prospective employees out of the same belief: they are convinced that those at the very top of the IQ scale have the greatest potential. (At Microsoft, famously, job applicants are asked a battery of questions designed to test their smarts, including the classic “Why are manhole covers round?” If you don’t know the answer to that question, you’re not smart enough to work at Microsoft.
^*
)

If I had magical powers and offered to raise your IQ by 30 points, you’d say yes—right? You’d assume that would help you get further ahead in the world. And when we hear about someone like Chris Langan, our instinctive response is the same as Terman’s instinctive response when he met Henry Cowell almost a century ago. We feel awe. Geniuses are the ultimate outliers. Surely there is nothing that can hold someone like that back.

But is that true?

So far in
Outliers,
we’ve seen that extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity. In this chapter, I want to try to dig deeper into why that’s the case by looking at the outlier in its purest and most distilled form—the genius. For years, we’ve taken our cues from people like Terman when it comes to understanding the significance of high intelligence. But, as we shall see, Terman made an error. He was wrong about his Termites, and had he happened on the young Chris Langan working his way through
Principia Mathematica
at the age of sixteen, he would have been wrong about him for the same reason. Terman didn’t understand what a real outlier was, and that’s a mistake we continue to make to this day.

3.

One of the most widely used intelligence tests is something called Raven’s Progressive Matrices. It requires no language skills or specific body of acquired knowledge. It’s a measure of abstract reasoning skills. A typical Raven’s test consists of forty-eight items, each one harder than the one before it, and IQ is calculated based on how many items are answered correctly.

Here’s a question, typical of the sort that is asked on the Raven’s.

Did you get that? I’m guessing most of you did. The correct answer is C. But now try this one. It’s the kind of really hard question that comes at the end of the Raven’s.

The correct answer is A. I have to confess I couldn’t figure this one out, and I’m guessing most of you couldn’t either. Chris Langan almost certainly could, however. When we say that people like Langan are really brilliant, what we mean is that they have the kind of mind that can figure out puzzles like that last question.

Over the years, an enormous amount of research has been done in an attempt to determine how a person’s performance on an IQ test like the Raven’s translates to real-life success. People at the bottom of the scale—with an IQ below 70—are considered mentally disabled. A score of 100 is average; you probably need to be just above that mark to be able to handle college. To get into and succeed in a reasonably competitive graduate program, meanwhile, you probably need an IQ of at least 115. In general, the higher your score, the more education you’ll get, the more money you’re likely to make, and—believe it or not—the longer you’ll live.

But there’s a catch. The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage.
^*

“It is amply proved that someone with an IQ of 170 is more likely to think well than someone whose IQ is 70,” the British psychologist Liam Hudson has written, “and this holds true where the comparison is much closer—between IQs of, say, 100 and 130. But the relation seems to break down when one is making comparisons between two people both of whom have IQs which are relatively high....A mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel Prize as is one whose IQ is 180.”

What Hudson is saying is that IQ is a lot like height in basketball. Does someone who is five foot six have a realistic chance of playing professional basketball? Not really. You need to be at least six foot or six one to play at that level, and, all things being equal, it’s probably better to be six two than six one, and better to be six three than six two. But past a certain point, height stops mattering so much. A player who is six foot eight is not automatically better than someone two inches shorter. (Michael Jordan, the greatest player ever, was six six after all.) A basketball player only has to be tall
enough
—and the same is true of intelligence. Intelligence has a threshold.

The introduction to the
1 vs. 100
episode pointed out that Einstein had an IQ of 150 and Langan has an IQ of 195. Langan’s IQ is 30 percent higher than Einstein’s. But that doesn’t mean Langan is 30 percent
smarter
than Einstein. That’s ridiculous. All we can say is that when it comes to thinking about really hard things like physics, they are both clearly smart
enough
.

The idea that IQ has a threshold, I realize, goes against our intuition. We think that, say, Nobel Prize winners in science must have the highest IQ scores imaginable; that they must be the kinds of people who got perfect scores on their entrance examinations to college, won every scholarship available, and had such stellar academic records in high school that they were scooped up by the top universities in the country.

But take a look at the following list of where the last twenty-five Americans to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine got their undergraduate degrees, starting in 2007.

Antioch College

Brown University

UC Berkeley

University of Washington

Columbia University

Case Institute of Technology

MIT

Caltech

Harvard University

Hamilton College

Columbia University

University of North Carolina

DePauw University

University of Pennsylvania

University of Minnesota

University of Notre Dame

Johns Hopkins University

Yale University

Union College, Kentucky

University of Illinois

University of Texas

Holy Cross

Amherst College

Gettysburg College

Hunter College

No one would say that this list represents the college choices of the absolute best high school students in America. Yale and Columbia and MIT are on the list, but so are DePauw, Holy Cross, and Gettysburg College. It’s a list of
good
schools.

Along the same lines, here are the colleges of the last twenty-five American Nobel laureates in Chemistry:

City College of New York

City College of New York

Stanford University

University of Dayton, Ohio

Rollins College, Florida

MIT

Grinnell College

MIT

McGill University

Georgia Institute of Technology

Ohio Wesleyan University

Rice University

Hope College

Brigham Young University

University of Toronto

University of Nebraska

Dartmouth College

Harvard University

Berea College

Augsburg College

University of Massachusetts

Washington State University

University of Florida

University of California, Riverside

Harvard University

To be a Nobel Prize winner, apparently, you have to be smart enough to get into a college at least as good as Notre Dame or the University of Illinois. That’s all.
^*

This is a radical idea, isn’t it? Suppose that your teenage daughter found out that she had been accepted at two universities—Harvard University and Georgetown University, in Washington, DC. Where would you want her to go? I’m guessing Harvard, because Harvard is a “better” school. Its students score a good 10 to 15 percent higher on their entrance exams.

But given what we are learning about intelligence, the idea that schools can be ranked, like runners in a race, makes no sense. Georgetown’s students may not be as smart on an absolute scale as the students of Harvard. But they are all, clearly, smart enough, and future Nobel Prize winners come from schools like Georgetown as well as from schools like Harvard.